the abernyte (1898)

The Abernyte was a 728-ton iron barque launched by Mackellar and Co at Dumbarton in Scotland in 1875, and wrecked in fog off Rill Head on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall on 8 May 1898 while carrying a cargo of 1,150 tons of nitrate of soda from Caleta Buena Chile to Falmouth. The voyage from Chile began on 29 December 1897 so it had taken her a little over four months to round Tierra del Fuego and sail across the Atlantic. Amazingly, her master, Edwin Cardwell, and crew of fifteen survived, pushing off in the lifeboat and being picked up by a Falmouth cutter shortly afterwards.

Rill Head is one of the most exposed places on this coast to be wrecked, with cliffs rising more than 50 metres and a tidal current of up to 5 knots. When Ben Dunstan and I went to find the site in August 2020 we were guided by the photo shown here, one of several images of wrecks made by the photographers Gibson and Sons of Scilly in the late 19th century. We knew that the wreck had been dived on years before, so we were surprised to find how much remained on the seabed – on my first dive in the main gully in only 6 metres I saw an anchor, and Ben found another area about 12 metres deep with a porthole, part of a sextant and a telescope, wonderful artefacts to discover in a wreck thought to have been ‘worked over’ by divers in the past. An unexpected discovery was a small iron gun – unusual on a wreck of this date, but some ships plying long-distance routes may continue to have been equipped with cannon. All of our finds have been reported to the Receiver of Wreck. Click on the images to enlarge.